November 16, 2010
Just upgraded to Firefox 4 beta 7 on my MacBook Pro and the (three finger) swipe down gesture I had grown to love (thanks to Will Henderson’s MultiClutch), suddenly became a “show tab view” gesture. This is no good! I’ve already become accustomed to swiping down to close tabs in Firefox.
A little googling, and I was able to get back my swipe-down-to-close-tab gesture and move the show tab view gesture to SHIFT + swipe down:
- Open up a tab and browse to “about:config” to bring up the Firefox configuration — proceed at your own risk.
- Type “gesture” in the Filter field to filter down to gesture-related preferences.
- You should see the preference browser.gesture.swipe.down of type string set to value Browser:ShowTabView.
- Right-click on the preference name and select New –> String from the context menu.
- Enter browser.gesture.swipe.down.shift as the new preference name.
- Enter Browser:ShowTabView as the new preference’s value.
- So, now you have added a SHIFT + swipe down gesture (swiping three fingers down while holding down the shift key) to perform the default function of swipe down. Now we take back our swipe down gesture…
- Double-click on the value of the browser.gesture.swipe.down preference and change it to cmd_close.
- You’re done! Swipe down and the about:config tab should disappear. Hold down shift while swiping down and you’ll see the tab view.
Now that gestures are supported on Firefox, I no longer need MultiClutch settings for Firefox.